Hobbyist electronics without hypocrisy

So, in my previous entry I talked about how I was excited to finally have a

multimeter and soldering iron again, so I could get back into hobbyist

electronics.

I wrote this immediately after a series of long and rambling posts in which I

sanctimoniously decried, well, just about everything, but in particular claimed

that I wanted to gradually stter my life my life in the direction of spending

less money, consuming less electricity and physical resoures, and producing less

physical resources. I also railed against non-reparable, self-obsoleting

consumer electronics which are literally designed to end up as landfil a few

years after they are sold.

I'm not unaware of the tension here, so how do I keep my favourite hobby but

also a straight face?

It's going to have to be a matter of placing constraints on myself. So, here's

a list of rules, or at least guidelines, I hope to stick to.

1. Build as few things as possible. What this basically translates into is

focussing on building things that I can get a lot of use out of (i.e. are open

ended) and am not likely to get bored of. A LOT of hobbyist electronic projects

are basically novelties or gimmicks, which are fun to design and build, and fun

to play around with for a few weeks, but don't really give you much more than

that. Anything based on cool/interesting light displays or weird sounds falls

into that category, at least for me (and I've built those kind of things). The

hard part here will be being honest with myself about whether I really will keep

using something for years and years.

2. Build very small things. This, on average, minimises the cost of components,

reduces the amount of space in my house/luggage taken up by the things I build

that I can't bear to part with, and reduces the amount of waste the I end up

producing if, worst case scenario, I have to scrap something.

3. Build things which consume very little power. This fits in with my general

desire to decrease electricity consumption to the point that I can one day hope

to generate everything I need myself. And, of course, if I build something

battery powered, I will use standard batteries.

4. Build things to be repaired, and to be disassembled. Use through hole parts

wherever possible, and put DIP chips in sockets. This will let me replace dead

chips quickly and easily, and it also means that if I stuff up with the "build

things you'll use for years" part of rule 1., I can quickly and easily scavenge

chips from the abandoned project to reduce waste. Permanently commiting parts

to potentially transient devices is a huge cause of waste.

4. Build things which will enable me to live the life I want to live. Part of

the ascetic, ultra frugal "hybrid timeline" life I envisaged in my epic series

of phlog posts was getting off-grid or close to it, so I could live at lower

cost, with lower environmental impact, and be more resilient. This involves

generating and storing my own power, and, ideally, having some kind or

infrastructure-free connectivity with the outside world (or at least other

strange people like me). I'm thinking some kind of mesh networking here. There

are plenty of technologies and skills around this kind of stuff that I don't

know as much about as I could, so focus on projects that build those skills so I

can use them in the future to make my dreams reality.

5. Build things unrelated to rule 4 only if I really consider them "worthy".

As I've mentioned, a lot of electronics projects are novelties. There's nothing

wrong with distracting yourself with novelties for a while, but it's easy enough

to do this in cheaper ways which don't accumulate physical posessions. A lot of

other projects are basically designed to facilitate laziness. Now that

hobbyist-grade IoT tech (tiny wireless sensors etc.) are affordable, plenty of

people are working hard to make sure they can turn off their lights with their

phone without getting off the couch, or that they get some notification when the

washing machine finishes. These kinds of projects irk me. It's not that I'm

above laziness, as such, there are plenty of times when I'd rather not get off

the couch too. But when you think about everything that goes into building,

say, a microcontroller, all the way from mining the rare Earth minerals to

flashing arcane patterns of light at highly polished wafers to turn them into

magical univerals machines, there's so much environmental impact there and so

much triumph of human ingenuity that taking the end result and using it to shave

mere minutes of extremely low effort work off an average week just seems kind

of...profane? Yeah, this is a bit preachy, but these are my rules for myself,

so I don't mind it. I will feel much better building things that I feel help me

(and hopefully others, as I intend to share all my stuff as Open Hardware)

exercise the more "worthy" parts of my abilities as a human: creative and

artistic expression, scientific curiosity, wonder at the natural world, etc. If

you're going to deviate from your principles, do it for something that means

something.

6. Don't use technology that offends my values. A lot of stuff in the

electronics world is incredibly proprietary. If you want to use a company's

microcontrollers, or FPGAs, you have to buy a devboard or a programmer from

them, and shitty closed-source Windows-only development software from them in

order to talk to that programmer using some proprietary and often poorly

documented protocol in order to upload the binary image, which in the case of

FPGAs is again a totally proprietary thing. You don't really understand any

of what you're doing, it's impossible or at least very difficult to build third

party tools. Once the manufacturer stops supporting a product, they basically

become junk. Of course, real engineers have to pinch their nose and make do

with this, because their job is to make their company money by getting to market

ASAP with a device which is as small and light and powerful as possible, and

that means using whichever parts will make that happen, even if they are

disgusting commercial junk. As a hobbyist, I have the privelege of choosing

whatever parts I want become I have a production run of one unit and no need to

turn a profit. I don't intend to squander this privelege, so this means no

FPGAs for me (although I think an open source toolchain is slowly coalescing

around some of Latice's "Ice" FPGAs, so perhaps one day). Hell, it's damn hard

to find GALs/PLCDs that it's easy to work with. I am a big fan of Atmel's AVR

microcontrollers for this reason. Commercial support could disappear entirely

tomorrow and I wouldn't blink because there's good open source software and

plenty of DIYable third party programmers. This is depressingly rare.

7. Use old parts, not the latest gizmos, where feasible (partially implied by

6). China is full of warehouses loaded with either unused old stock or

salvaged parts from the 70s and 80s, and plenty of those warehouses have eBay

stores (presumably targetting people repairing old stuff). Using these parts

saves them from eventually being thrown out, and means that all the resources

and energy put into making them in the first place is not for naught. A lot of

old tech is perfectly good for hobbyist use, and actually if one of your goals

is to learn and understand things deeply, older tech is usually better,

because it's simpler. Old CPUs (Z80, 6502, 6809, 8086, etc) almost always come

in through hole packages, and are fantastically non-proprietary. The

instructions sets are all well-documented, and simple enough that you can

remember most of them after a bit of experience. There are usually good open

source tools (compilers, assemblers, debuggers, etc.), and programming them

just means burning your code to an (E)EPROM. There's no secret sauce with

(E)EPROMs, they are totally generic and transparent, plenty of companies made

and make 'em, and you can easily build your own programmer and write your own

software to talk to it (I've done both). If you salvage the parts from some

old equipment, you can even read the ROM back and disassemble it, perhaps

you'll learn something intersting. By contrast a lot of modern

microcontrollers are designed so that you can't read the code back out with a

password, to prevent industrial espionage.

That's all I can come up with for now. Time will tell how well I can stick to

these goals, but at least I have a plan.